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 The Military Early Bird for Oct 28, 2007 Please Scroll down to the News headline, to read the entire article; scroll down to that News Article number to read. Use of these news articles does not reflect official endorsement. Reproduction for private use or gain is subject to original copyright restrictions. Story numbers indicate order of appearance only. This is the single print version. Use the PRINT command in your browser to print the entire Early Bird as one document. (NOTE: This single file format is a long document and can use 50 or more pages of paper.) IRAQ
October 28, 2007 Pg. 1 Iraq Hampers U.S. Bid To Widen Sunni Police Role By Michael R. Gordon HABBANIYA, Iraq — The American military’s push to organize Sunni Arabs into local neighborhood watch groups has been one of the United States’ most important initiatives in Iraq — so much so that President Bush flew to Anbar Province in September to highlight growing alliances with Sunni tribal leaders. But now that the Americans are trying to institutionalize the arrangement by training the Sunnis to become policemen, the effort has been hampered by halfhearted support and occasionally outright resistance from a Shiite-dominated national government that is still inclined to see the Sunnis as a once and future threat. It was the American military that pressed to open the new Habbaniya Police Training Center, where Sunni tribesmen and former insurgents are to be trained to serve as policemen in Anbar. And it was the Americans who provided the uniforms, food, new classrooms and equipment for the police recruits. While the Iraqi government has agreed to basic police instruction at the academy, it has balked at training police leaders there. The government has also scaled back plans by Anbar officials to expand the provincial police force by almost 50 percent. “The Ministry of Interior deals with the Sunni provinces different than they deal with the other provinces,” said Brig. Gen. David D. Phillips, an American Army officer who oversees the training of the Iraq police. “The only reason the Anbar academy opened is because we built it, paid for it and staffed it.” He said the Interior Ministry “was very hesitant about it.” The ministry says that it pays the salaries of the Iraqi personnel here and that more money will come as soon as proper administrative procedures are established between the government and the academy. Anbar is not the only source of contention. In Diyala Province, north of Baghdad, American military officers have pushed the Iraqi government to hire more than 6,000 local Iraqis, many of them Sunnis, as policemen. Despite promises of action by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, none have been hired by the Interior Ministry. Maj. Gen. Benjamin R. Mixon, who is winding up a tour as the senior American commander for northern Iraq, said in an interview at his headquarters at Camp Speicher that the “foot-dragging” stems from “highly sectarian” hiring in Baghdad. “They want to make sure that not too many Sunnis are hired,” he said. “The situation is unsatisfactory in terms of hiring Iraqi police.” The rise in tensions over efforts to hire more Sunni policemen comes at a critical moment in the American military deployment in Iraq. With the number of American combat brigades set to decline by one quarter by mid-July, American commanders are eager to build up the Iraqis’ capability to secure their neighborhoods. One way has been to organize local Sunnis into neighborhood watch groups, what the American military calls “Concerned Local Citizens.” The benefits of this approach have been evident near Yusufiya and Mahmudiya, in an area south of Baghdad that was once so violent it had been known as the “triangle of death” and has been overseen by the Second Brigade of the American Army’s 10th Mountain Division. Before neighborhood watch groups were organized in this region in June, more than 12 American and Iraqi soldiers were killed each month in the area, according to an analysis circulating within the American military command. After June, the killings declined to one soldier each month. The number of vehicles destroyed from roadside bombs was running at 11 per month before June, but is averaging less than one per month now. But organizing local Iraqis into neighborhood watch groups is just the first step. The Americans’ ultimate goal is to codify the arrangement by training these groups as police forces. The Americans also hope that by persuading the Iraqi government to hire Sunnis as policemen they will encourage a new, ground-up form of political accommodation. Shiite-dominated ministries in Baghdad will develop new working relations with largely Sunni police forces in the field, easing the sectarian divide and laying the basis for a more representative national government, or so the theory goes. At its best, the process of hiring new Sunni Arab policemen is a bureaucratic one. Prospective recruits have their fingerprints taken and undergo retina scans that are included in an intelligence database. The list of potential recruits is submitted to the Interior Ministry, which generally submits it to a committee of national reconciliation overseen by close Maliki aides. With American pressure, the process has led to some new hires. In the town of Abu Ghraib, just west of Baghdad, 1,738 of the 2,400 Sunnis who had been put forward to serve as policemen in the town were hired. Plans have been made to add 12,000 policemen in Baghdad over the next six months, and it is estimated that about half would be drawn from the ranks of Concerned Local Citizens. But as Diyala shows, the process does not always run smoothly. American forces pushed through western Baquba, the capital of the province, in June in an effort to sweep the city clear of militants from Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a mainly Iraqi insurgent group with foreign leadership. More than 4,600 Concerned Local Citizens have since been organized in Diyala Province. But hiring them as policemen has proved difficult. Mr. Maliki ordered that the Diyala police force be increased in size by more than 6,000, and provincial officials submitted a list of names in July that included many Sunnis to the Interior Ministry in Baghdad. But some Interior Ministry officials have questioned whether such a substantial increase is needed, and some members of the reconciliation committee have argued that the original Maliki decree may no longer be valid, putting the plan to hire them in limbo. While no action has been taken on the list, the Iraqi government surprised the Americans by hiring 548 Iraqis who had not been on the roster. When American officials analyzed the new hires, they determined that the list was mostly made up of Shiites. It was not the only time that the Interior Ministry had hired Shiite policemen despite the concerns of local officials. The ministry sent 663 Shiite policemen in recent months to the city of Tal Afar in the northern Nineveh Province. Wathiq al-Hamdani, the police chief in Nineveh, said in an interview at his Mosul headquarters that the decision was made over his objections and would undermine efforts to establish a force that was more balanced on sectarian lines. “We are trying to have some Sunni police officers in Tal Afar, but we have a lot of problems in doing that,” he said. Diyala and Tal Afar are mixed areas where both Sunnis and Shiites live, so they have drawn the attention of the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government. But even Anbar, an overwhelmingly Sunni Arab region in western Iraq, has been of concern to wary Iraqi officials in Baghdad. Initially, provincial police officials in Anbar proposed adding 9,000 officers to the force of 20,911, an expansion they said was needed because of the vast territory in western Iraq. But the Iraqi government ordered that the provincial force be increased by only 4,000, and issued orders to start the expansion by hiring 3,000 of them. As for the rest of the 9,000, 2,000 are eventually to be hired by the National Police, which reports to the Shiite-dominated Interior Ministry. And 3,000 are to be given civilian jobs that involve no law-enforcement or military training. Financing for the Anbar police has also been carefully controlled. The police chief is given his budget in 250-million-dinar increments — about $200,000 — and required to provide receipts. No other province has its police financing so carefully metered, American officials say. To augment its ability to train policemen and supplement the training at the Baghdad police academy, the Iraqi government has decided to build two new police academies. They are to be located in the southern city of Basra and the northern town of Mosul. That is of little help to the Sunnis in Anbar. So the Americans pushed this summer to establish a police academy at a former Anbar air base that the British established at Habbaniya during their colonial occupation. At a cost of just over $10 million, the Americans financed the complex and paid for the international police advisers, who are mostly Americans. The base, which is situated between Falluja and Ramadi, is also used for training the Iraqi Army and still features the sturdy structures erected during the British occupation, as well as a British cemetery. Brig. Gen. Khalid Adulami, the dean of the Habbaniya academy and a former officer in the Republican Guard during the days of Saddam Hussein’s rule, said many of the prospective recruits were picked by Sheik Abdul Sattar Buzaigh al-Rishawi, the leader of the Sunni tribal movement in Anbar who was assassinated in September. The academy will soon graduate its second class of recruits, more than 700, and plans to expand its enrollment. Maj. Gen. Abdul Karim Khalaf, a senior official at the Interior Ministry in Baghdad, said that the ministry was working to solve financing problems. But General Adulami said the American military seemed to be more concerned than Iraqi government officials that his recruits were properly clothed, fed and trained. “We know the Americans better than the Iraqis,” he said. “Nobody at the Ministry of Interior asks us what we need.” <A name=e20071028556416.html> Washington Times October 28, 2007 Pg. 1 Karbala Security Returns To Iraqis By Kim Gamel, Associated Press BAGHDAD--U.S. forces will turn over security to Iraqi authorities in the southern Shi'ite province of Karbala tomorrow, the American commander for the area said, despite fighting between rival militia factions that has killed dozens. Karbala will become the eighth of Iraq's 18 provinces to revert to Iraqi control, despite President Bush's prediction in January that the Iraqi government would have responsibility for security in all of the provinces by November. Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, who leads the 3rd Infantry Division, said the Iraqis were ready to assume full control of their own security in Karbala province, home to shrines of two major Shi'ite saints, Imam Abbas and Imam Hussein. U.S. troops remain ready to help if needed. He dismissed concerns about Shi'ite rivalries in the region, two months after clashes of militiamen battling for power erupted during a major pilgrimage in the provincial capital, also called Karbala, left at least 52 persons dead. "Of course there's violence in the area, but not nearly of the magnitude that would cause me to be troubled by it," Gen. Lynch said yesterday. "This place is about a struggle for power and influence and there are indeed inter-Shia rivalries where different groups are trying to be in charge and sometimes they revert to violence, but it's not at the magnitude that's got me concerned," he said during a visit to a patrol base being constructed in Nahrawan, a Shi'ite city of 120,000 on the southeastern edge of Baghdad. Karbala, 50 miles south of Baghdad, has faced several bombings that have killed dozens of people since the Sunni insurgency began in the late summer of 2003, just months after the U.S.-led invasion in March. It also was the site of one of the boldest and most sophisticated attacks on U.S. soldiers in the war in Iraq, when gunmen driving American sport utility vehicles, speaking English, wearing U.S. military uniforms and carrying American weapons abducted four U.S. soldiers at the provincial headquarters and later fatally shot them. A fifth soldier was killed in the Jan. 20 attack. More recently, Karbala has been a focal point for rising tensions throughout the mainly Shi'ite south among rival groups maneuvering for power over the oil-rich area that also profits from religious tourism. But Gen. Lynch, who commands a volatile mix of Sunni and Shi'ite areas south of Baghdad, said the Iraqis were ready to take over. "They've established a Karbala operations command that works with the Iraqi prime minister, and when security problems arise it's the Iraqi solution to the problem, not the coalition solution to the problem," he said. The provincial police chief, Brig. Gen. Raed Shakir, said more than 10,000 Iraqi security forces were "fully prepared" to maintain order. In January, Mr. Bush announced his new strategy for stabilizing Iraq and his decision to send an additional 30,000 U.S. combat troops to Baghdad and Anbar province. He said at the time, the Iraqi government "plans to take responsibility for security in all of Iraq's provinces by November." The Pentagon later amended that to next March, and then again to at least next July. Last year, the relatively peaceful southern provinces of Muthanna, Dhi Qar and Najaf were returned to Iraqi security control. In April, Maysan province in the southeast was the fourth to revert. In May, the Kurdish regional government assumed security responsibility for the largely peaceful Kurdish Autonomous Region of northern Iraq: Dahuk, Irbil and Sulaimaniyah provinces. In violence yesterday, a bomb struck the mainly Shi'ite town of Jisr Diyala, 10 miles southeast of Baghdad, killing eight persons. It was the second such attack in the town in less than a week. In northern Iraq, clashes broke out between al Qaeda in Iraq fighters and a rival Sunni group near the volatile city of Samarra, and police said 16 militants were killed. Also yesterday, the U.S. military announced the death of an American soldier killed Thursday by small arms fire during operations in the Salahuddin province, a mainly Sunni area north of Baghdad. <A name=e20071028556396.html> Washington Post October 28, 2007 Pg. 17 Sunni Violence In Baghdad Called Disrupted Petraeus Says Al-Qaeda in Iraq Strongholds Are Cleared, but Insurgents Remain 'Lethal' By Joshua Partlow and Amit R. Paley, Washington Post Foreign Service BAGHDAD, Oct. 27 -- The top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, said Saturday that the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq has been disrupted and no longer operates in large numbers in any neighborhood of the capital. "In general, we think that there are no al-Qaeda strongholds at this point," Petraeus said. He added: "They remain very lethal, very dangerous, capable at any point in time, if you will, of coming back off the canvas and landing a big punch, and we have to be aware of that." Throughout the U.S. military buildup this year, soldiers have focused on denying sanctuaries to al-Qaeda in Iraq fighters by arresting their leaders, attempting to hinder foreign fighters from entering the country, and partnering with Sunni residents to improve the quality of intelligence about the organization. In recent months, U.S. and Iraqi military commanders have noted a marked decrease in sectarian violence and in civilian and U.S. casualties. Petraeus, speaking to reporters during a trip to the southern outskirts of the capital, attributed the reduction of violence in part to military operations outside the capital targeting areas where car bombs and other explosives are manufactured, before they can be deployed in Baghdad. He said one of the last remaining al-Qaeda in Iraq strongholds in Baghdad had been the southeastern section of Dora, a predominantly Sunni neighborhood in the southern part of the city, but after military operations over the past two weeks, "that was reduced, certainly." "They're still there, don't get me wrong, and they're still in Adhamiyah, there's still some in Mansour," he said, referring to other Sunni neighborhoods of Baghdad. Al-Qaeda in Iraq is just one of many groups, large and small, fighting in Iraq. The Shiite militias in particular have pursued campaigns of sectarian cleansing, at times working with Iraqi security forces to kill and displace Sunni families. Petraeus said he sees uneven progress in terms of stopping Shiite militia violence. He mentioned Bayaa and al-Amil, two neighborhoods in southwestern Baghdad where the Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia loyal to anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, has emerged as a dominant force, as among the more difficult. He described another nearby area, Sadiyah, as probably "the toughest that is out there now." Fresh violence broke out across the country Saturday, with at least 23 people killed or found dead in separate incidents, the Associated Press reported. In Diyala province, north of Baghdad, Iraqi soldiers said they killed 40 suspected insurgents during an operation with U.S. troops targeting al-Qaeda in Iraq. The fighting took place east of the provincial capital, Baqubah, and was assisted by former Sunni insurgents who have recently aligned themselves with U.S. forces, they said. In northern Iraq, three roadside bombs targeting a convoy of trailers carrying concrete blocks south of Kirkuk killed eight people and wounded six others, said police Col. Abbas Muhammad Ameen in the city of Tuz Khormatu. Two other bombs detonated in Kirkuk near police patrols, killing one officer and wounding five, police said. The U.S. military also announced that an American soldier had been killed by small-arms fire Thursday in Salahuddin province. Meanwhile, Turkish officials issued fresh bellicose threats to invade northern Iraq and take on Kurdish guerrillas holed up in the mountains there. Thousands of Turkish citizens protested against the guerrilla group, the Kurdistan Workers' Party, and chanted condemnations of the United States. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said international pressure to refrain from an invasion would not affect his decision. "The moment an operation is needed, we will take that step," Erdogan told a crowd in the northwestern port city of Izmit, according to the Reuters news service. "We don't need to ask anyone's permission." Special correspondent Naseer Nouri in Baghdad and other Washington Post staff in Iraq contributed to this report. <A name=e20071028556467.html> Los Angeles Times October 28, 2007 Iraqis To Take Over Security Of Karbala After several delays, it will be the eighth of the 18 provinces to see U.S. forces transfer control. By Christian Berthelsen, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer BAGHDAD — U.S. military officials said Saturday that they would turn over security for Karbala province south of Baghdad to Iraqi security forces on Monday, marking the eighth of the country's 18 provinces where Iraqis have assumed control. The move has been delayed several times as violence has continued to erupt there. As recently as August, about 50 people were killed in clashes between rival Shiite militias competing for control of the region's oil resources. The fighting erupted during a pilgrimage commemorating the birth of Mohammed Mahdi, one of Shiite Islam's 12 most revered imams. The Shiite pilgrimages are also often a target of Sunni insurgents using suicide bombers and snipers. In January, five U.S. soldiers were killed in Karbala in a raid on a compound by gunmen dressed in U.S. uniforms. Still, "it's to the point where they are going to pull it off," said Army Master Sgt. Dennis Beebe. An Iraqi brigade commander said a celebration was planned for Monday at Karbala stadium. Haidar Abadi, a member of Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's Islamic Dawa Party, said Maliki "thinks that the armed forces are very prepared and up to the responsibility." Meanwhile, a bomb killed eight people and injured 13 early Saturday near a stretch of restaurants southeast of Baghdad where day laborers gather and people prepare for the commute into the capital, police said. Two women and two Iraqi police officers were among the wounded. Elsewhere, the U.S. military announced the death of a soldier who was shot Thursday during an operation in Salahuddin province northwest of Baghdad. No further details were released, and the soldier's identity was withheld pending notification of next of kin. There have been 3,838 U.S. military personnel killed in Iraq since the invasion in March 2003, according to the website icasualties.org. An official at Yarmouk Hospital in Baghdad said that as many as 150 Iraqi soldiers may have suffered a bout of food poisoning and that 50 of them were taken there for treatment. Army officials have complained in the past that vendors sometimes served substandard food to their forces. Thirty-five of the soldiers were discharged after being treated. In Diyala province northeast of Baghdad, the commander of the Muqdadiya police force, Col. Amer Nusaif Jassim, and seven of his officers were reported abducted at a checkpoint on the road between Muqdadiya and Baqubah on Saturday morning, the Interior Ministry said. The U.S. military reported capturing the leader of a splinter group of the Mahdi Army militia that was not honoring Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr's pledge of a temporary cease-fire. The group had allegedly been engaged in armor-piercing roadside bombing attacks on U.S. soldiers, kidnapping operations and weapons procurement. Two other alleged militants were killed in the raid, one of whom was said to be wearing a suicide bombing vest, and 14 others were captured. The U.S. said the cell leader had ties to Iranian intelligence. Iraqi police said they found the bodies of four people shot to death on the streets of Baghdad on Saturday. Times staff writers Raheem Salman and Wail Alhafith contributed to this report. <A name=e20071028556495.html> New York Daily News October 28, 2007 8 Dead, 13 Hurt In Iraq Blast BAGHDAD - A bomb exploded Saturday in a predominantly Shiite area southeast of Baghdad, killing eight and wounding 13 others, police and hospital officials said. The blast in Jisr Diyala, targeted restaurants frequented by government employees and construction workers. <A name=e20071028556423.html> Washington Times October 28, 2007 Pg. 4 Bin Laden Tape Hints At Al Qaeda Frailty By Shaun Waterman, United Press International Osama bin Laden's appeal for unity between Iraq's Sunni insurgent groups confirms what many have believed for some time: al Qaeda in Iraq is increasingly isolated and that splits in the insurgency may be its greatest weakness. "Sticks refuse to break when banded together, but if they come apart, they break one by one," bin Laden said in his latest audio message, portions of which were broadcast Monday by the Al Jazeera television network. "There is no room for conflict between the Muslims who truly surrender to the order of Allah." Analysts, however, are divided over the exact intended audience for the full message, which was released the following day with English subtitles by al Qaeda central's media arm, As-Sahab. In the message, bin Laden praises the bravery of the fighters he calls mujahedeen, or Islamic holy warriors, but gently chastises them for unspecified "mistakes," warns them sternly against the dangers of factionalism and reminds them that disputes have to be settled according to the Islamic Shariah law. The al Qaeda leader does not mention any groups by name, and while some commentators see his words aimed squarely at his own followers in al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), others see them pitched as a more general appeal to a Sunni insurgency increasingly riven by factionalism. "He is trying to float above the fray," said Evan Kohlmann, an international terrorism consultant who tracks the public statements of Iraqi insurgent groups and has testified in federal terror prosecutions. "I don't think the message was aimed solely at AQI," he said. But Fawaz Gerges, an academic and author who recently returned from a year in the region, where he researched the insurgency, said the message was aimed squarely at bin Laden's own followers in AQI who had alienated their social base, the Sunni Arabs. He said that the references to mistakes and how everyone makes them and how repenters are forgiven, was bin Laden "airing al Qaeda's dirty linen in a belated and desperate effort ... to rescue his besieged followers in Iraq." He said bin Laden's talk about the need to submit to Islamic authority was "indirectly telling AQI [it] should defer to the Iraqi leadership" of other Sunni groups. For its part, AQI's press arm, the al-Fajr Media Center, posted a statement Wednesday charging Al Jazeera had "counterfeited the facts by making the speech appear as [if it were] exclusively targeting the brothers and sons inside al Qaeda." In reality, the group said, "the speech was originally an advice given to the Muslims of Iraq in general and to the honest people of jihad in particular." A U.S. intelligence official authorized to speak to the press said the bin Laden message was seen as just the latest manifestation of growing worries among al Qaeda's central leadership about the situation in Iraq. "There have been long-standing concerns about the ability to unite Sunni insurgents," the official said. Last year, in an effort to give a more Iraqi face to al Qaeda's role in the insurgency and to head off looming rivalries and splits with other groups, AQI declared the formation of the Islamic State of Iraq. But the U.S. official said it had "proved to be in most respects a complete failure in terms of the effort to unite" insurgent groups. <A name=e20071028556465.html> Los Angeles Times October 28, 2007 A Haven For Kurdish Rebels Who Await The Turks PKK fighters train in Iraq's northern mountains, sheltered by the terrain and by villagers who hail them as champions of their rights. By Asso Ahmed, Special to The Times MARDU, IRAQ — It is a land of resistance, the mountain peaks and winding valleys where Iraq's Kurds battled Saddam Hussein for decades. Now another generation of guerrillas is bunkered down waving the flag of Kurdish nationalism in the Qandil mountains, this time in a fight against Turkey. Iraqi Kurds and members of the Turkish separatist Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, live together in this vast mountain range that straddles Iraq, Turkey and Iran. The haven provided to the Turkish Kurd rebels here infuriates the Turkish government in Ankara, which has been locked in an intense conflict with the Kurdish separatist movement that has cost thousands of lives since the 1980s. With as many as 100,000 Turkish troops poised to march across the Iraqi border to attack PKK camps, a military response to a rebel ambush in southern Turkey last week that killed 12 soldiers, Iraqi Kurds may now pay a steep price for ignoring the problems caused by the PKK presence in the north. "Iraqi Kurds generally sympathize with PKK fighters. It is a force that has been demanding and fighting for the rights of Kurds in Turkey for tens of years now, and the Turks have been very harsh to their Kurdish community by forbidding them from rights," said Asso Hardi, editor-in-chief of Awena, an independent newspaper in the city of Sulaymaniya in Iraq's semiautonomous Kurdistan region. "On the other hand, many Iraqi Kurds view the PKK as an entity . . . which has caused many problems to the relatively stable Kurdistan area of Iraq, especially with neighboring countries." Up a winding series of switchbacks lies Mardu village, northeast of Sulaymaniya. Kurdish farmers tend livestock and harvest peaches, apples and grapes. A few houses among dotted oak trees serve as a makeshift headquarters for the PKK. Male and female fighters, dressed in traditional billowing shalwar pants and olive combat tops, walk freely. Local Iraqis openly support them, and some Iraqi Kurds have left city life and their families to become soldiers with the Turkish Kurd rebels and their Iranian sister movement, Party for Free Life In Kurdistan, or PEJAK. The villagers toast the guerrillas as champions of Kurdish rights. They say they are willing to endure sacrifices as the price of their association with a movement fighting to establish Kurdish self-rule in Turkey and Iran, where they believe their minority's basic privileges are denied. "Three times I lost my house but I never scorned the Kurdish movement. The PKK and PEJAK have been in our village for years," said farmer Mohammed Wasso, 64, whose property was destroyed during the Iraqi Kurds' hard-fought war against Hussein's forces. Some describe the PKK as a vital trading partner and protector in a lawless area. Hussein Rashid, 45, regularly hauls gasoline and kerosene from Iran to sell to the guerrillas. He warned, "If the PKK is not here, then this will be a place for terrorism and Iran will send Ansar al Islam," a Sunni extremist group with links to Al Qaeda. Shereen Sulaiman, 39, a mother of three, worried about what Turkey might do to the PKK. The rebel fighters "respect the people and serve the area. They even supply the area with electricity. I don't want them to be hurt," said Sulaiman, wearing a red dress with her hair covered by a black veil. "They are Kurds like us." Kurds speak a distinct language and have a separate culture from that of Turks, Persians and Arabs. They are believed to be the world's largest ethnic group without a state, with a total population estimated at 25 million to 40 million. During the 20th century, Kurds were embroiled in bloody conflicts against governments in Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran, countries that at times have destroyed Kurdish villages and executed Kurdish political activists accused of treason. Hussein's forces slaughtered tens of thousands of Kurds to quell a rebellion in the 1980s. In the Qandil mountains Thursday, PKK fighters from Syria, Turkey and Iran stood in their green combat fatigues by a well, busy washing their clothes. Others cleaned rifles with rags and brushes. They had hiked across the mountains for two or three days of classes on the party's ideology. Diyar Swirani, a blue-eyed, pale and thin 25-year-old, was one of the fighters. He had opted for the spartan life in the mountains, working to liberate southeastern Turkey for the Kurds, instead of staying at home with his family in Sulaymaniya. "When I see Kurdistan at the mercy of the enemy's weapon, we must move if we love Kurdistan and call it a country of the Kurds," Swirani said, holding some flowers he had picked in the mountains. He left his home in Iraq three years ago. He was casting about after graduating from secondary school when he started reading Kurdish nationalist literature, and PKK founder Abdullah Ocalan seized his imagination. His uncle had friends who had fought for the PKK, and he approached them, asking how he could meet fighters with the group. They told him to drive to the Qandil mountains, past the last of the Kurdish government checkpoints into the remote terrain that no government controls. His parents argued that he should go to university, but he ignored them and left without saying goodbye. He drove to the guerrilla checkpoints marking the territory under nominal PKK control. At first the fighters questioned him -- to determine if he was a spy for the two main Iraqi Kurdish parties, which control Sulaymaniya, Irbil and Dahuk. The PKK fought bitterly with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Democratic Kurdistan Party in the 1990s, but since 2000 they had been left alone. When Swirani answered their questions satisfactorily, the PKK let him stay. He entered a rigorous six-month training period, which included political and social studies in Kurdish history and leftist ideology. War training started at the crack of dawn. Trainees had to run the Qandil's valleys and mountainsides. They were drilled through evening on how to handle a gun and respond under enemy fire. Eventually Swirani wrote to his parents, letting them know he was well and inviting them to visit. His main fighting experience came one year ago, when he joined a 10-man PKK squad crossing into Turkey to launch ambushes on military convoys. The two sides traded fire for an hour before the PKK fighters, outnumbered, dashed for cover and made their way back to Iraq. Asked about Turkey's threat to crush PKK camps in Iraq, Swirani said: "We are ready to defend the mountains. . . . It must be protected against the Turkish-Arab nationalists." Swirani's squad leader stood nearby: Sheera Kurdistani from Iraqi Kurdistan's Zakho region. She joined the PKK when she was 19, mesmerized by the stories from PKK fighters who sought refuge in her village. At 33, she is a hardened veteran in dusty fatigues, slinging a rifle, her face leathery and her hair pinned tightly in a bun. She supervises a roadside checkpoint. She expresses no regret over her sacrifices to the PKK. "We have given up our personal lives until we become martyrs or we have reached our aims." Times staff writers Ned Parker, Raheem Salman, Salar Jaff and Said Rifai contributed to this report. <A name=e20071028556444.html> Atlanta Journal-Constitution October 28, 2007 Turkey's Moves Against Kurds Limited By Terrain Nature, terrain may have a bigger say in Turkey's decision that do diplomats and generals By Douglas Birch, Associated Press Ballenda Pass, Iraq--For most of the last decade, Kurdish guerrillas have staged attacks on the Turkish military from sanctuaries in Iraq's north, where no roads cut through the dense forest and jagged peaks, some already topped with waist-deep snow. Until now, the world paid little notice to the simmering conflict in an isolated region that has escaped control by any government for decades, if not centuries. A sharp escalation in the fighting has brought Turkey to the brink of sending troops south across the border, threatening to plunge Iraq's only stable region into chaos and warfare. Turkey has demanded immediate action from the United States and Iraq. Fighting here would pit two U.S. allies--Turkey, a member of NATO, and Iraq's Kurds--against each other; threaten supply lines for U.S. troops in Iraq; and, perhaps, unravel apparent progress in reducing the violence in the rest of Iraq. Winter comes closer each day Turkey delays a decision on whether to invade the towering Qandil range, where the separatist guerrillas hide. But Jabar Yawar, a spokesman for Kurdistan's Peshmerga Regional Defense Forces and a former guerrilla fighter himself--against Saddam Hussein--said disrupting the rebels' operations in the region would not be simple. "Do American and Iraqi forces operating in Iraq, can those forces capture the leaders of al-Qaida in Iraq? Or in Afghanistan or Pakistan?" he asked. The separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, denies it has bases inside Iraq, but government officials here admit the guerillas roam freely across international borders in this mountainous region, where Baghdad exercises little or no control. From 1979 to 1991, Yawar fought with the Peshmerga--then an insurgent group--against Saddam and Iraq's ruling Baath Party. Periodically, Peshmerga fighters sought refuge in the mountains, near where the borders of Iran, Iraq and Turkey meet and near where the PKK has recently had a major base. "There are areas in those mountains like Siberia, where even now you can walk up to your waist in snow," Yawar said. In this lawless border region, which stretches up to 25 miles deep into Iraqi territory, there are no roads--only forest and mountains. "The army of Iraq under Saddam, with all its might and military forces, failed to go into this area," Yawar said. "So how can a small Iraqi army like we have now, which cannot control its own territory against terrorists, enter into these mountains?" Several factors could limit the scope of the fighting, which pits a few thousand PKK insurgents against Turkey's massive and well-equipped army. Those factors include diplomatic pressure from the U.S. and its allies; the desire of Iraqi Kurds to preserve the relative peace and prosperity they have achieved in the new Iraq; and the prospect for Turkey of fighting a guerrilla war in the winter in this beautiful and forbidding terrain. But the failure of talks held Friday in Ankara between the Turkish government and an Iraqi delegation suggests that the Turks may not feel they have exhausted their military options. Earlier, Iraq promised to shut down PKK political offices here, but Turkey insisted that Baghdad go much farther by closing all PKK camps in the border region and halting any guerrilla activity. "We are totally determined to take all the necessary steps to end this threat," said Turkish President Abdullah Gul. <A name=e20071028556464.html> Boston Globe October 28, 2007 Turkey Keeps Options Open In Dealing With Rebel Kurds By David Rising, Associated Press ANKARA, Turkey - Turkey's top military commander promised yesterday to make Iraq-based Kurdish rebels "grieve with an intensity that they cannot imagine," while the prime minister said his nation would fight "when needed," regardless of international pressure. The military chief, General Yasar Buyukanit, said Friday that Turkey would wait until Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan met with President Bush in Washington on Nov. 5 before deciding on any cross-border offensive. But Erdogan said his country could not be pinned down by dates in deciding whether to attack. "We can't say when or how we will do it, we will just do it," he said. Talks between Iraqi and Turkish officials failed to produce any breakthroughs Friday, and the Iraqi delegation returned home yesterday. Clashes between government forces and guerrilla fighters have been escalating since the rebels broke a cease-fire in 2004. Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, fighters have killed at least 42 people in the past month. Those casualties included some 30 Turkish soldiers in two ambushes that were the boldest attacks in years. "We are determined to make those who cause this sadness grieve with an intensity that they cannot imagine," Buyukanit said. The bellicose comments were made amid an increasing nationalist fervor in Turkey, with the country's red flag with white crescent and star - and images of modern Turkey's founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk - draped over scores of balconies, displayed in the backs of cars, and sold by vendors walking the streets. Thousands took to the streets of several Turkish cities, condemning the PKK and pushing for action. About 1,000 people chanted "down with the USA, down with the PKK" outside the US Embassy in Ankara and said they were ready to fight the Kurdish rebels. Hundreds more people marched in Istanbul, while 1,500 more took to the streets of the predominantly Kurdish city of Sirnak, in southeastern Turkey near the Iraqi border. Military helicopters shuttled more troops in to the mountains near Iraq, while patrols secured roads and checkpoints. In a show-of-force exercise about 20 miles from the border, near the village of Ikizce, a group of Turkish tanks fired 10 rounds into the mountains toward Iraq. Elsewhere, Turkish forces shelled two Iraqi areas along the western portion of the 205-mile border, Iraqi border guard officer Colonel Hussein Tamr said. Meanwhile, the PKK indicated it was considering the release of eight Turkish soldiers it captured in an operation on Oct. 21 in response to calls by a lawmaker. <A name=e20071028556334.html> Mideast Stars and Stripes October 28, 2007 Fires Claim Hundreds Of Acres On Camp Pendleton 850 families evacuated, 1 building damaged By Lisa Burgess, Stars and Stripes MARINE CORPS BASE CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. – Three fires on this sprawling, 200-square mile Marine base this week consumed hundreds of acres, but the only damage was one burned outbuilding on a firing range and a single, sprained ankle, according to officials. Whether they were fighting fires, helping families evacuate their quarters, helping San Diego County residents, or evacuating themselves, “10,000 Marines were moving from place to place over the course of the week,” Commandant James T. Conway said Friday during a visit to Pendleton. “All that was done without serious accident [and] a level of expertise I don’t think anybody expected entirely,” Conway told a members of 5th Marine Regiment who helped set up an evacuation center on the base. It was a challenging week for the base’s Marines, pushing them to live up to their motto of “adapt and overcome” in ways that felt much like a battlefield, Pendleton base commander Col. J.B. Seaton III, said during a Friday briefing to Conway. It is a well-known military principal that in combat, “the enemy gets a vote,” Seaton said. In this instance, “the enemy was wind and flame — and the enemy voted heavily this week,” he said. For Cpl. Andrew Greving, 23, a data systems administrator from Edgerton, Wis., who is with the 5th Marine Regiment’s Headquarters Co., the 18-hour days he pulled from Monday to Wednesday “felt very familiar.” Greving was deployed to Ramadi, Iraq, from Feb. 2006 to January 2007, he said. The smell of the acrid smoke, the look of the red sky at night and the rush from being involved in an all-out crisis operation “felt good, like home,” he said. “You don’t get tired” while it’s going on, he said. “Too much adrenaline. But when you crash, you crash.” When Greving finally got to the barracks for six hours of rack time, he was so tired “I didn’t even get my socks off,” he said. He just removed his blouse and boots, and collapsed. With the on-base crisis mostly over Friday night, there were a lot of Marines in crash mode. DJs spun music to nearly empty clubs on base, despite the inviting cool ocean breezes bringing welcome, smoke-free air to weary lungs. Earlier in the day, the skies over the base were a haze of headache-inducing smoke, as firefighters worked to put out the largest and last of the three fires, dubbed the “Horno Fire.” That fire was one of two that began Tuesday morning, sending the 60 percent of the base’s firefighters who were not already off-post helping to fight fires in San Diego County rushing to the scenes. The Horno fire caught first, at about 9 a.m. in an area occupied by the 1st Marine Regiment. By midday Friday, the Horno fire was 80 percent contained, but had burned 20,000 acres, according to Marine Cpl. Paul Robbins Jr., a base spokesman. At one point, the Horno Fire jumped Interstate 5, and it also prompted the evacuation of 850 Marine family members from a base housing area to the shelter site set up by the 5th Marine Regiment. Another fire, which began on the Wilcox small arms training range where Pendleton Marines conduct most of the M-16 qualifications, also began on Tuesday, around 10 a.m., Robbins said. That fire was completely contained by the following afternoon, after destroying 100 acres and damaging a minor outbuilding used on the range. <A name=e20071028556445.html> Washington Times October 28, 2007 Pg. 4 Personal Causes Motivate Runners By Dan Schiff, Washington Times The Marine Corps Marathon annually showcases top-flight talent and familiar faces, but its claim to being the "People's Marathon" rests among the more than 20,000 other runners expected to pound the pavement through the District and Northern Virginia. Today's 32nd running of the race — scheduled to begin at 7:50 a.m. in Arlington — still offers no prize money, but the goal of completing the 26.2 miles will be reward enough for many entrants. Among them will be Virginia Tech students Logan Thompson, 19, and Julia Kott, 20, both of Stephens City, Va., who were left numb in April when a gunman killed 32 members of their college community before committing suicide. They decided to run the marathon with a group of Virginia Tech supporters that started small but ballooned to 100, thanks to the enthusiasm of race director Rick Nealis. Each Virginia Tech runner was responsible for raising $1,000 so the team could endow a $100,000 Hokie Memorial Marathon Fund scholarship at Virginia Tech. Mr. Thompson, a sophomore mechanical engineering major, thinks running a marathon is a suitably challenging endeavor to commemorate lost classmates and professors. "A 10K or something like that, that's looked upon as great. But a marathon, people stand back and say, 'Wow, they did something. They put forth a lot of effort,' " he said. Both students knew a shooting victim personally, and Miss Kott, a junior biology major, said she will draw on the strength of those not present. "I definitely think we're going to have extra motivation," she said. "We're running for those victims." As first-time marathoners, Mr. Thompson and Miss Kott will be up against some seasoned veterans, including a few holdovers from the first running of the Marine Corps Marathon in 1976. Five hardy "Groundpounders" will each be attempting to complete the race for the 32nd consecutive time. Mel Williams, 69, of Norfolk is running his second marathon of the year and his 121st overall. He ran the first Marine Corps Marathon while teaching a marathoning course at Old Dominion University in Norfolk. He ran it for about 13 years before he realized he had a streak going. Mr. Williams hopes to bounce back from a personal worst finish in last year's race and finish in the neighborhood of 3 hours and 30 minutes, though he admits that his prime marathon days are behind him. "They're getting harder with age," he said, chuckling. "I started running marathons in my late 30s. They got a little easier in my 40s, even up to age 50. Then from that point on it's been pretty much downhill." Mr. Williams acknowledged some friendly competition with other Groundpounders over who would be the "last man standing." He said he has no illusions about his marathoning future but no current plans to slow down, either. "Every year I try it, just go out and put the miles in," he said. "Hopefully I'll be running around in my 80s like some people are, but that's a ways down the road." Jill Stevens, 24, from Kaysville, Utah, is a 10-time marathon finisher and will represent her state in the 2008 Miss America pageant. Miss Stevens is visiting the District for the second time and said she is eagerly anticipating the marathon's sightseeing benefits. "I'm really trying to get out and see our nation's history," she said, adding that it would be "really exciting to do that while running, so two great passions at the same time." Whatever challenges the race poses, Miss Stevens has been through worse. As a sergeant in the Utah National Guard, she served a year in Afghanistan as a combat medic. Her war experience led Miss Stevens to partner with Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors Inc., for which she and more than 200 other marathon runners are raising funds to benefit grieving families of armed forces casualties. "When I heard about this program, it just worked so perfectly, we both wanted to help each other out," she said. "With the battle buddies that I've lost out there, it's a great cause to be running for." <A name=e20071028556432.html> Norfolk Virginian-Pilot October 28, 2007 New Navy Surgeon General Weighs Civilian Roles In Changing Times By Kate Wiltrout, The Virginian-Pilot PORTSMOUTH--The Navy's new surgeon general, who made his first trip to Hampton Roads in his new role last week, faces no shortage of challenges. Navy medical personnel are worn down by deployments to combat hospitals in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait, Vice Adm. Adam Robinson Jr. said in an interview. The Navy hasn't met its recruitment targets for medical students since 2004, he added. And Robinson said he must convince civilian medical schools "that we are really in a long, protracted war and we need help from the American people and American medical institutions." Stateside, the Navy is converting thousands of military medical jobs to civilian positions and changing the way it trains military doctors. Traditionally, the Navy required its doctors to serve on a ship or at a clinic as a "general medical officer" after a one-year internship. "It's a situation and an institution that's worked well in the past," Robinson said. "It's not going to work well now." He noted that 34 states require more than one year of experience before licensing physicians. So over the next five years, the Navy will switch to a system in which doctors finish both their internship and residency before serving in the fleet. "I think it will have a positive effect for our medical school students," said Robinson, who spent seven years here in the 1990s: five as chief of general surgery at Portsmouth Naval Medical Center and two more with the Navy's Atlantic surface fleet. After three years at the helm of the National Naval Medical Center in Maryland - better known as "Bethesda Naval" - Robinson became surgeon general in August. At Bethesda, where the bulk of blast-induced traumatic brain injuries are handled, the Navy is preparing for a proposed merger with Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Robinson said he has no plans to change the way the Navy treats injured troops. Bethesda and San Diego Naval Medical Center will continue taking the most critical cases: Bethesda because it specializes in blast-induced traumatic brain injuries and San Diego because it's near Camp Pendleton, a large Marine Corps base. As the war continues and casualties mount, "Portsmouth may have to step up and take center stage in how we're delivering the care, and we may actually let other places step back," Robinson said. Portsmouth, one of the three largest Navy medical centers, is contributing to the war effort by sending personnel to war zones and on humanitarian missions, he said. Navy medical personnel play an increasingly prominent role in disaster relief and humanitarian efforts. Navy ships responded to the southeast Asian tsunami in 2004 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and medical teams were sent to Pakistan after a devastating earthquake that year. This month, the hospital ship Comfort finished a four-month mission providing basic health care to 98,000 people in 12 nations in Central and South America. While the war especially requires anesthesiologists, critical-care nurses, trauma surgeons and mental health personnel, humanitarian missions often call for obstetrician-gynecologists, pediatricians and internal medicine specialists, Robinson said. The Navy's conversion of 148 military physicians to civilian positions in 2005 has most affected uniformed doctors in family practice, internal medicine and pediatrics, according to a Government Accountability Office study last year. Robinson said hiring civilian doctors makes financial sense because the Navy saves personnel and retirement costs. But if too many positions are converted, it can hobble military members' career paths. It also removes those positions from the pool of people who can be used for deployments. "I have to make sure as I convert I don't destroy my readiness of the operational and uniformed forces," Robinson said. "That is a major issue." <A name=e20071028556483.html> Baltimore Sun October 28, 2007 Mids Hear Frank Talk On Sexual Assault Expanded Academy program includes 25 hours of training By Bradley Olson, Sun reporter List them. Call them out. Go ahead, don't be shy, urge the two midshipmen, who are looking for fellow students to help them compile a list of common terms for promiscuous men and women. The men are "studs" and "pimps." And the women? "Slut" and "door knob" are called out immediately, and beyond that, well, suffice it to say the words aren't really allowed in a family newspaper. And the list in this category, it goes on and on. Midshipmen Joy Dewey and Joshua Foxton have a point to make to their classmates, one that isn't quite new in the lexicon of gender studies and societal perceptions but still hits home to the ones they're trying to reach: Men who sleep around are lionized, and women are put down, objectified, shunned. "A lot of times, the problem you have with sexual assault training is that people go, 'It's never going to happen to me, it's never going to happen to anyone I know, so I don't need to deal with it,' " said Dewey, 21, a leading figure in the academy's new Sexual Harassment and Assault Prevention Education, or SHAPE, which was announced earlier this year. "But what this [training] does is place the responsibility not just on yourself, but as a future officer, a responsibility on you for that command that you're going to have one day." Just a few years ago, this kind of frank talk was pretty rare at the Naval Academy, most will acknowledge. But not anymore. After a sexual assault scandal rocked the Air Force Academy in 2003 and was followed by several high-profile court cases in Annapolis, students such as Dewey and Foxton are on the front lines of a far-reaching education and prevention effort that may exceed that of any other university. The SHAPE program, which now reaches only freshmen but will expand to all classes within the next three years, makes training in sexual misconduct mandatory. By the time they graduate, every midshipman must receive 25 hours of training, a figure that some critics believe is not nearly enough. Still, unlike previous education efforts, which were usually given after lunch via slide shows for 30 minutes, little is repetitive, and students are learning the meaning of terms such as bystander, consent, masculinity, rape trauma syndrome and survivor recovery. If they miss it, they have to make it up. Students such as Dewey and Foxton are giving up more than half of their paltry free time to the seminars. Dewey even went to a conference last week in Orlando to present details about the program to other universities. More than 130 midshipmen are specifically trained either to educate their peers about sexual misconduct, troubleshoot in small groups to disrupt a situation that could develop into harassment or assault, or act as authorities to whom incidents can be reported. "We're trying to break the link in the chain," said Cmdr. Ricks Polk, who along with a group of consultants helped design the new program and is overseeing its implementation. "I don't know how many times I heard in a case that if [a person] ... would have done something, taken some action, it might break that chain of events that allowed the assault to ultimately take place. No one thing caused the assault, but all of them could have possibly stopped it from happening." In the program's first months, Polk and students said, they've been surprised with how well the training has been received. New methods in trying to involve students in discussions, like the "stud" vs. "slut" example that was demonstrated on Thursday for reporters, have led to a number of what they like to call "aha" or "whoa" moments among those they're instructing. In another case, they held a seminar dubbed "1 in 4" just for men, in which they highlighted the widely publicized statistic that one in four college-age women experiences sexual assault. A police officer described a male-on-male rape, and the students then asked Mids how they would feel if it happened to them. "You could hear a pin drop," said Polk, the academy's sexual assault response coordinator. They also tell the freshmen "bystanders" are not the rapists, or the ones giving SHAPE training, because they have advocated against harassment and assault. They are the ones in between, the ones who might be in a position to intervene and save a shipmate from a terrible ordeal. Laura Schneider, one of 32 students who pair up to give the five annual hour-long seminars to groups of 40 of their peers, said she could see the training working already in herself. "I didn't ever think I had a problem or that I was biased against women, but I've come to the realization that I've let things slip when I should have stepped in," said Schneider, 20, a senior from Portland, Ore. Now, the nasty jokes and negative comments about women don't go unnoticed, she said. "I just kind of have this check in the back of my mind now. When I hear something that before I probably would have let go, now I think twice. Maybe I'll say that's not the best joke to be telling. ... And through having those thoughts continuously, it changes behaviors." <A name=e20071028556384.html> Washington Post October 28, 2007 Pg. 1 Shipping Out From Childhood, Two Brothers Knew They Would Serve as Soldiers. Now They Are Headed to Iraq, Facing the Uncertainty of War Together. By Peter Slevin, Washington Post Staff Writer SALEM, Ind. -- Brett and Kurtis Walters played army in the woods as kids. They dueled at video games and spent untold hours debating who was stronger and cooler, Superman or Batman. Years later, they are still giving each other grief. Kurt still favors Batman, and Brett recently proved his allegiance to the Man of Steel by having a stylized "S" tattooed onto his back. Brothers and best friends who work together and hang together, Brett and Kurt will soon head to Iraq together, soldiers in the same nine-member Indiana National Guard squad. When they contemplate what they will find in the unpredictable dust of Anbar province and how the fight will change them, they talk in the terms of the comic books of their adolescence. The bad guys can't get him, Brett, 22, told his worried 19-year-old wife, because they have no kryptonite. "And what if I lose Kurt over there?" Brett asked. "We don't talk about it in a serious manner. It's, 'Dude, if you die, I'm taking all your DVDs.' I told him, 'If you die, I get your truck.' " As the U.S.-led battle for Iraq's future rumbles toward the five-year mark, the Walters brothers are among the thousands of part-time warriors who will quit their civilian lives and their home towns to spend 10 months in a parallel reality. Four state Guard brigades, among them Indiana's 76th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, will mobilize in early December, the next wave of deployment to support President Bush's plan for keeping at least 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq through next year. More than 3,400 Indiana soldiers are training now for the war, a conflict more complicated, more unpredictable and less popular than at any time since the March 2003 invasion. When the troops -- farmers and factory workers, students and executives, sons and daughters -- ship out, they and the communities they leave behind will be braced for the worst. "This is a tougher mission," said Col. Courtney Carr, commander of the Indiana brigade. "There's a good chance that not all our soldiers will come back." To prepare, soldiers are taking leave from work and school to practice convoy security and urban-warfare skills amid the foggy cacophony of mock Iraqi towns complete with minarets and clusters of beseeching citizens. They are studying how to recognize roadside bombs and escape from charred Humvees. And they are learning to fire every weapon in case a squadmate is felled in battle, an acknowledgment that rising casualties create fresh necessities. Whatever the rest of the country, and their neighbors, think of the worthiness of this war, Indiana's soldiers say they have plenty of motivation -- a mixture of loyalty to their country, devotion to their comrades and determination to succeed. "When the big game comes," Sgt. 1st Class John Ingle said one day at the Salem armory, "you want to get in there and see if you've got it." Panic in a Humvee From behind the doors of a Humvee carcass spinning on a spit, the grunts and curses sound like the muffled audio of a wrestling match. Soldiers in fatigues, upside down and discombobulated, still strapped into their seats, struggle to unharness themselves from the make-believe wreckage of a roadside bomb. Minutes pass. First two, then four, then six, an eternity in a battlefield emergency. Sgt. Shaun White finally becomes the first to emerge through the only unlocked door. He closes it behind him and moves to take a crouching position against enemy fire. "Hey, hey, HEY!" shouts Sgt. 1st Class Jesse Sheets, a trainer leading the exercise. "Your buddy's in there!" After the soldiers spill out, the Humvee is righted and the next squad piles in. Sheets takes a break and offers a simple equation: If a Humvee rolls over in Iraq, soldiers will die. Stationed nearby in case of trouble, medic Jeremy Thompson watches. "I've heard more cuss words today than I have in my entire life," Thompson says. "A lot of panic, more than you'd think." This is not the National Guard of the early 1990s, when Indiana veterans remember drill weekends as little more than bull sessions broken by sporadic bouts of push-ups. Back then, fuel for the vehicles and ammunition for the weapons were limited. The notion of overseas combat was at best abstract. More than 60 percent of the Indiana soldiers, who range from teenagers barely out of high school to veterans topping 50, have served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Some crossed into Iraq in March 2003 with the invasion force that toppled Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, while others, such as the Walters brothers, guarded Afghan bases. But few have experienced the steadily morphing insurgency, with its elusive enemy and complex rules of engagement. National Guard armories scattered around the state draw soldiers from all over -- urban Fort Wayne and Indianapolis, college towns and regional centers, and sleepy burgs such as Salem, bounded by cornfields and serenaded by freight-train whistles and Friday-night football crowds. In a place where military tradition is strong and Guard membership is a matter of pride and opportunity, the 76th Brigade includes father-son, father-daughter and husband-wife pairs who will deploy together. A 47-year-old letter carrier and pastor joined the Guard as a paymaster when he learned that his 21-year-old son would deploy. Now the son is staying home to attend college under a ROTC provision, and the father is heading to Iraq. Kurt and Brett Walters, born 18 months apart to a military mother who enlisted when she was 17, said they always knew they would join. Their mother, Dani Sabens, was a big part of that certainty. She spent 28 years in uniform, mostly working supply and logistics and looking after her soldiers. Three years after formally retiring as a master sergeant, she still works at Camp Atterbury, the state's principal training facility. "She always joked with us that when we were born, she forged our names on the forms," said Brett, who remembers the way his mother would come straight from work and head with them to the grocery store, still wearing her fatigues. "Even as a little kid, I would see all the other kids staring at my mom with that look on their faces," Brett said. "I always wanted to be an inspiration like that." Kurt was asleep one January morning in 2001, a few days after his 17th birthday, when Sabens woke him up and said they had to get going to the Salem armory. Sleepily, he asked why. "We're going to enlist," she said. "Okay," he replied. "Let's go." "It wasn't like she made us," Kurt, a 23-year-old sergeant, says now. "We wanted to. We wanted to serve our country and protect the people we knew. We were going. As soon as we were running around as kids, we were wearing Army clothes. We'd go up in the woods and pretend the trees were the enemy and beat the hell out of them." Sabens considers military service an elemental act of patriotism. She also liked the idea that her boys would collect their own paychecks, attend college tuition-free and, in boot camp, "grow up and become men." "I told them throughout their early life I didn't care which service they joined," she said, "as long as they wore a pair of boots." Simulated Chaos To prepare for duty protecting military convoys in Iraq -- scouting routes and escorting supply trucks through the gantlet of roadside bombs -- Indiana soldiers training at Fort Knox sat at large computer consoles that simulated the view of Iraq from inside a Humvee. A driver and a radio man sat next to a gunner operating a .50-caliber machine gun whose trigger and sight were linked with the events on the screen. Vehicles and people appeared, variously innocent and suspect, as the driver worked the accelerator, brake and wheel. The anxious gunner faced decisions -- when to shoot, when to hold his fire. Soon enough, a trainer operating the master controls made an insurgent's rocket hit home, blasting the Humvee's mock windshield and spattering it with red video blood. The computers are programmed to simulate convoys, patrols and ambushes, explained Rick Talbott, a retired Army reservist who manned the control consoles and led the soldiers through after-action discussions. He pointed to his video screen, which tracked convoys moving from desert landscapes and airfields to labyrinthine city neighborhoods in ever more complex maneuvers. "They learn from their mistakes," Talbott said. "Take out one of their vehicles, we see how they react to it. You can't sit there and be totally engulfed by fire from the roofs. They have to plan an exit strategy." Across the room, in near darkness, another set of computers allowed soldiers to maneuver on foot through urban landscapes alongside their squadmates, each with a 360-degree view of the battlefield. Beyond a partition, trainers at consoles of their own played the roles of guerrillas, typically hurrying through the streets carrying AK-47s or satchel charges. Squad members called out their positions and movements in voices steadily louder and more urgent. "Keep your eyes open for strange vehicles, strange packages, people running away from a vehicle! Scan your rooftops, too," Sgt. Benjamin Bennett instructed. A soldier yelled to a buddy: "Turn around! You've got a guy crawling up behind you!" Boom. A rocket-propelled grenade exploded on the screen. "Jesus Christ," one soldier muttered. "Wiped us all out." Five screens went black, and white letters appeared: "You are dead." Don't Forget the Xbox It didn't take a war, Kurt Walters learned, for Army life to change him. He was more serious about football than his studies at Salem High School, 30 miles northwest of Louisville. After graduation in 2003, he headed to boot camp, where he worked hard and made closer friends than he had imagined he would, "because of what we went through." "You come back," Kurt said, "and get together with your friends and drink beer, and you realize how immature they are -- and you were." "And are," added Chelsea Walters, 21, his wife. The couple started dating three years ago and married last year. For the Walters brothers, preparing for Iraq means arranging leave from their jobs as guards in a Kentucky psychiatric detention center and making sure the mortgage payments will be drawn from their combat pay. It means getting new laptops equipped with webcams and arranging to have an Xbox 360 in their Iraq hooches to play Guitar Hero II and Halo 3. It also means squeezing in some fishing and drinking. A frequent companion is Joe Steepleton, who sometimes seems like the third Walters brother. They met as teenagers working at Hardee's. A motorcycle accident that shattered his wrist required four pins and a metal plate and kept him out of the Marines. Now 24, married and a father, Steepleton oversees liquor supplies at a casino in nearby French Lick. The deployments -- Kurt and Brett served in Afghanistan in 2004 and 2005 -- leave him worried, feeling as though he has no friend to call on his days off. "I think he gets more emotional in missing him than I do," Chelsea said of Steepleton's friendship with Kurt. "They're the married couple." As the clock ticks down again, Steepleton aims "just to hang out and have a good time, man, because you never know if it's the last time you'll see them. I try not to think about it, but I know it could happen. But we have a motto: You live for the day." 'It's for Keeps' "When you know you're going to be going, the intensity level goes up. It's for keeps," said Todd Baker, commander of Salem-based Charlie Company and a radio account executive in civilian life. "If we don't do our jobs, soldiers are going to suffer." Bandages and tourniquets, to take one example, are no longer Boy Scout stuff. "That could be saving my buddy's life," Baker said. "I want my buddy to be able to save my life." Baker is also the training officer for the 1st Battalion, 152nd Cavalry (RTSA), based in New Albany, just north of the Ohio River. The battalion, which includes Charlie Company, the Walterses' unit, is not only cranking back into wartime mode just two years after returning from Afghanistan. It also has the added task of transforming itself from a standard cavalry unit into a faster, more versatile unit known by the acronym RSTA, for reconnaissance, surveillance and target acquisition. Typically, such a transition would mean sending soldiers to Army schools, but Baker and his colleagues were forced to develop their own model because classrooms across the country are full and time is short. The Indiana warriors, summoned to reinforce an overstretched active-duty military, are headed back to the combat zone two years sooner than commanders had anticipated. Because the classrooms are so full, Baker said, "it probably would have taken four or five years to get our soldiers qualified." In any army, the hardest aspects of training to master and quantify are leadership and cohesion. Sgt. 1st Class Ingle, a combat veteran, believes that his men will be prepared to fight and to watch one another's backs. Yet he wonders how they will react if one of them is killed. He wonders what will go through his own mind. "I'm not worried about anything except that," said Ingle, 33, a divorced father of two. "All these guys standing on this drill floor, I know their parents, their brothers, sisters and wives. I'm not worried about getting killed. I've led a good . . . life. There are those that haven't. They're just kids." 'Don't Be a Hero' Kurt and Chelsea had a baby boy named Brayden in September. Brett and his wife, Danniel, are expecting a girl any day now. They will name her Alexis Gabrielle, a combination of Brett's middle name and the name of a character from "Desperate Housewives." Brett is also trying to scrape together at least $800 to adopt Danniel's 5-year-old daughter, Brooklyn, before he deploys. The couple had what he calls a "put-together wedding" with family during the summer. They will have "her wedding" when he returns. He has promised to salt away between $2,000 and $5,000 to pay for it. When they discussed her desire to be married ahead of his deployment, she said she wanted things in order for the baby. He teased her that it was only about the life insurance. But death is not a topic they often raise with each other. "I try to avoid it and go in the kitchen," Danniel said one recent night as Brett read a bedtime story to Brooklyn. "We don't talk about what if this happens, what if that happens. We talk about what I'm going to do when he's overseas." One thing she will do is paint their new place, a two-bedroom house built in 1889 and bought for $59,000. She told Brett he could choose the color of one room, but after joking that he prefers black, he left the choice to her. Danniel, for her part, is expecting to spend plenty of time with Chelsea. The two women are close. They waitressed together and worked in the same nursing home and may do so again. "We call and grump together all the time," Danniel said. "If I have a bad day, I'll call and grump to her and she'll grump to me." The year of call-up should be excellent for their bank accounts. Brett said he makes "maybe $20,000" with overtime at the psychiatric facility. In Iraq, he expects to pocket at least $40,000, helped by state and federal tax breaks. He will reenlist while there, sheltering his $15,000 bonus from taxes. Brett will put $1,200 a month into Danniel's account, the rest into his own. "I said I don't want access to it," Danniel explained. "I'm a girl. I'll spend too much." Those in the group are still a few weeks from saying goodbye to one another for the next major training. After mobilizing to Camp Atterbury in December, the soldiers will make it home for Christmas before leaving in early January for Fort Stewart, Ga., and two months later for Iraq. The Walters brothers are already planning a celebratory road trip for their return, with a few Charlie Company friends and maybe Steepleton, if he can afford it. Kurt, who wears a ball cap that says TKB, for Tappa Kegga Beer, figures on buying a |
